Thursday, October 18, 2012

Beck and Jameson

“The
spatial peculiarities of postmodernism are symptoms and expressions of a new
and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual
subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities,
whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life
all the way to the unimaginable de-centering of global capital itself.”
(Frederick Jameson)

Ulrich
Beck’s “Logic of Wealth and Risk Distribution” discusses risk as something that
is “mediated on principle through argument,” thus lending it an implicit
conceptual nature (27). Beck breaks down
this “knowledge dependency” into two parts, the “theoretical” and the “normative.”This breakdown relates to the difference
between the actual recorded problem
and the perceived identification of
the problem as “a systematic side effect of modernization”(27).This dichotomy of the perceived and the
actual, which only act as “risk” when they come together, reminded me to a
certain extent of Frederick Jameson’s argument about the death of the
individual in the post-modern consumer world.

I
located this correlation between Jameson and Beck by diagraming my comprehension
of “risk” as follows: there is the self,
which experiences a negative phenomenon (I’ll call, a problem); there is a diagnosis of the problem by a
professional; there is the comprehension
of the problem by both the individual and the larger community, within the
structure of the culturally defined meaning of the problem.Thus, between the self and the comprehension,
the risk moves from a specifically personal phenomenon to an implicitly larger
(perhaps even global) schematic.

Through
this diagram, Jameson’s interest in the “radically discontinuous realities” of
the post-modern world seem to take on an interesting new meaning. While Jameson
was originally talking more about identity in contemporary spatial temporal
reality, it seems applicable to tie “identity” to a certain degree to “risk.” Jameson’s and Beck’s essays demonstrate that
they are, at the very least, correlated by nature of their similar basis in spatial
temporal reality—which is to say, they are similarly dependent on the specificity
of their point on these two axes.Thus,
while risk and identity do not necessarily relate to one another in a causal
relationship, they share a similar causal relationship, which draws a link
between their existences, and suggests that it can be hypothesized: the
individual’s experience of risk in
the larger schematic of the risk as a conception
can be understood in much the same way as Jameson’s “individual” faces the
risks inherent in post-modern reality.The
potential of this relationship leaves me wondering, is the dichotomy of the self and the comprehension, and the relationship between the two, the basis of
an imagined community?